gilesbowkett.blogspot.com Archives - 16 March 2013, Saturday

Unfuck A Monorail For Great Justice , refers to a frequent problem: monolithic Rails apps (or "monorails "), and the fact that the people who work on them will often describe them as fucked. My first book covers some of the reasons that monorails happen in the first place. This book i...

Are you a hacker who likes to make music? You know how you feel precise control when you write code you understand, but you have to filter your understanding of your music through oversimplified GUIs which sometimes have terrible UX? I made a series of videos which teaches you how to ...

Are you a hacker who likes to make music? You know how you feel precise control when you write code you understand, but you have to filter your understanding of your music through oversimplified GUIs which sometimes have terrible UX? I made a series of videos which teaches you how to ...

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Rob Conery wrote, in a blog post about how Ember confuses him: A controller proxies the model, and then exposes itself to the rendering engine so that the view can consume it (you may need to read that sentence twice)... This is where I hit a conceptual wall. First: let me say that I'...

Gary Bernhardt's an amazing programmer. His Destroy All Software screencasts teach his approach to writing software, which is powerful, fluid, and unique. It is an amazing thing. Whenever I find out that a programmer I respect is not familiar with Destroy All Software, I lose a little...

I'm putting all my products on discount until the end of the day Friday, March 1st. I'm also bringing back a classic product, at a nice discount as well. WHO BUYS MY STUFF? For obvious reasons, I can't name names without being a bit of a dick, but I think I can tell you my customers i...

Rails claims that convention over configuration is one of its core principles. When Rails first arrived, in many instances, it took the greatest ideas and most common use cases of Web development, streamlined them, simplified their developer interface, and repackaged them within clean...

Are you a hacker who likes to make music? You know how you feel precise control when you write code you understand, but you have to filter your understanding of your music through oversimplified GUIs which sometimes have terrible UX? I made a series of videos which teaches you how to ...

From Feb 2nd to Feb 8th, I ate no food at all, consuming only water. I am not a doctor; none of this is medical advice. But people have asked me about it, so I'm going to explain a little. Geeks will have an easier time understanding fasting than regular people. Garbage Collection I g...

as of Light Table 0.2.0, the entire thing is now built on top of ClojureScript and the only Clojure left in the system is used for evaling Clojure. With the help of the Node-Webkit project out of Intel, we now use Node.js for all of our platform interaction and we rely on chromium to ...

Many people who take Amy Hoy's 30x500 class praise it , and rightly so, because they seem to do well afterwards. Some of their products look very enticing . I took the class myself, at a discount, thanks to Ms. Hoy's generosity. Before I took the class, I had already made and sold my ...

There are lots of à la carte software environments in this world. Places where in order to eat, you must first carefully look over the menu of options to order exactly what you want. I want this for my ORM, I want that for my template language, and let's finish it off with this routin...

I think the problem is the concept of a stack. Everybody builds Rails apps their own way. There's a 37Signals (or omakase) stack, a Thunderbolt stack, a Hashrocket stack, and many other stacks, and in most cases the "stack" is not a fixed machine but a fluctuating ecosystem. (I'm not ...

Get ready for some epic hand-waving. I'm reading Reg Braithwaite aka Raganwald's new book JavaScript Allongé , and -- because it's a Leanpub book and therefore to some extent a work in progress -- subjecting it to some pretty merciless copyedits as I go. JavaScript Allongé explores Ja...

It's the name of a Murakami book and exhibit, but it's also the question taunting online journalism. Jason Calcanis thinks newspapers will die ; newspapers themselves are trying to heal ; and Adrian Holovaty wants to open the door . But Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News have all chosen su...

I guess I was pontificating a little, but I want to go into more detail. Rails does something brilliant with its association classes like belongs_to and has_one ; it gives composition the same kind of emphasis and importance that inheritance already enjoys in every class-based object-...

The book will guide you through the creation of a simple language written in Ruby. Once you’ve been through the exercises in the book and feel ready to dive in and create a real language, you’ll start from the template language running on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) included with t...

Two very intelligent individuals named Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil have a long-running $10,000 bet about whether or not, by 2029, the Turing Test will be beaten. However, both these individuals have missed something painfully obvious. The Turing Test has already been beaten - and the...

One of the big author names to drop in the 1990s, besides the cyberpunks, was Hakim Bey, a philosopher who wrote Pirate Utopias and The Temporary Autonomous Zone . Temporary autonomous zones empowered the kinder, gentler post-modern anarchist to create safe havens of sane behavior out...

Inheritance is always bad, only composition can be our true savior! Only standalone command objects can give us the reusability this application needs! Turning patterns into articles of faith takes them out of the realm of rational discussion. Code either adheres to the holy patterns ...

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In a "How I Work" interview on LifeHacker.com, Tim Ferriss recommends the OS X app Scrivener: Scrivener, the word processor I've used for the last two books. Unlike Word, it doesn't crash every five minutes, and I can look at multiple docs at once in the same window. [It's] minimalist...

I am in awe of Persimmon who is our raid leader. She works in a hospital in real life. She is the stabilizing force during the raids, supporting the class leaders, nudging the conversation and keeping the raid moving as fast as possible without moving too fast. I find that she reminds...

I had a random thought the other day: I actually did write it. You can buy it if you want. The funny thing is I wasn't actually serious when I tweeted that. The "I should write that" part was really just a knee-jerk reaction. Whenever I'm complaining about the non-availability of some...

"We built it, and that drew an audience, so we'll monetize the audience, even though it'll drive them away. The audience is big enough that we can probably make a little money before the whole thing falls apart, and if we're lucky, we might be able to sell the company to somebody who ...

Here's an easy way to write better blog posts. First write out your idea, without concern for quality. Just express the thought at hand. Next go through the text, eliminating the passive voice anywhere you find it. Do it again for adverbs , and a third time for run-on sentences . Maki...

The biggest problem with Markdown: John Gruber. ...the fact that there has been no improvement whatsoever to the specification or reference implementation for five years is kind of a problem. There are some fairly severe bugs in that now-ancient 2004 Markdown 1.0.1 Perl implementation...

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Undoubtedly overkill, but the time for sacrificing basic usability to personal cleverness was the 1990s, when the Web was new and its user experience fundamentals were unknown enough to justify experimenting. Breaking the back button two decades later is just shameful, especially now ...

A Downside To Curated "Journalism" A Refactoring Opportunity Within Rails 3 The Dark Side Of Trolling Why Does Twitter Suck? Believe It Or Not, It's The... When Pixar Makes A Horror Movie, The World Will Be... You Fuckers Are Adorable I Think This Would Be Better Stylization And Abbre...

Apologies to the entire open source community, because I'm raising this on my blog rather than participating in the open source development process around Rails, especially since it's entirely possible this is already fixed in Rails 4. However, I've often gotten the impression that sp...